IMF Chief Lagarde to Stand Trial

Charges are unrelated to her greatest crimes – representing the US-controlled IMF and Western monied interests at the expense of beneficial social change.

The agency is a bandit operation, the loan shark lender of last resort, force-feeding economic and financial harshness on nations in return for loans – followed by new ones needed to pay debt service, an endless cycle of debt peonage, monied interests profiting hugely.

Ordinary people suffer greatly as expected. So do debt-entrapped countries, forced to obey harsh IMF diktats – incompatible with social democracy, civil and human rights.

Nations are strip-mined of their resources, material wealth, state enterprises, and other crown jewels – transferred from public to private hands, hollowed out into dystopian backwaters, their people able to have jobs transformed into serfs.

Except for the privileged few, the result is the worst of all possible worlds – wracked by extreme poverty, hunger, malnutrition, diseases and early usually painful death.

Washington got Lagarde appointed – to serve as a neoliberal maestro of misery.

Her activities as French finance minister were investigated earlier for serious improprieties – specifically a controversy pitting tycoon Bernard Tapie against the French state.

She issued a beneficial 403 euro arbitration order earlier in his favor, against the government she was sworn to serve.

The French Court of Cassation (its highest judicial body) Attorney General Jean-Louis Nadal earlier ordered the Tapie dossier made public, including allegations indicating Lagarde circumvented the law – to benefit Tapie illegally, overriding an appeals court ruling against him.

A French judicial commission ordered Lagarde to stand trial. She’s charged with negligence in the long-running so-called L’Affaire Tapie. He was ordered to repay his windfall.

Observers called France’s Cour de Justice de la Republique judicial commission ruling last Thursday a surprise. In September, prosecutors recommended things be dropped.

Her legal team issued a statement, saying “Ms. Lagarde would like to reaffirm that she acted in the best interest of the French State and in full compliance with the law.”

She’s appealing the ruling against her. Things could drag on for many months before concluding.

He stopped short of explaining her mandate is benefiting powerful monied interests at the expense of everyone else.

Expect no interruption in business as usual at the agency she heads – with full US support.

Image: Reuters

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected] His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III. http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html. Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

4 Commentson "IMF Chief Lagarde to Stand Trial"

And so went and still goes the miseries that are Greeks to bear for generations…..It was a salvo, to each and every nation-state, be careful, be very careful, as all are to be targeted —if not by the IMF, then every trade agreement being secretly (?) produced under the phony minimal goal of reducing trade barriers (not the real goal –see ISDS -investor-state dispute settlement clauses in every deal—scariest are the Trade in Services Agreement (sole purpose –equals total privatization of a nation-state public programs and services….)…